


they don't know each other

by casmourde



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Angst, Confessions, Fluff and Angst, Love Confessions, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:27:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25421653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casmourde/pseuds/casmourde
Summary: At a gas station, of all places, Charlotte and Ted finally have a moment in their lives that they'll remember fondly. Well, mostly.
Relationships: Charlotte/Ted (The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	they don't know each other

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like 2 days and its probably bad but :) i realized that there is a CRIMINALLY low amount of CharTed content on the internet and i am determined to fix that, so here's... this. probably really angsty but also happy?

A truck with a column of smoke trailing behind it flicked past, cutting like a knife through puddles on the uneven road. Windows rattled, threatening the patrons inside of the gas station with rain. The aisles, which snaked this way and that, were cold and smelled like metal. Someone had left the AC on for too long, and many of the customers didn’t look very happy about that.

Ted stood near the exit, his eyes flitting quickly across the display on the counter. He was certain that the keychains had been much prettier the last time he’d checked. Even the one he’d had his eye on, a brown cat holding a ball of yarn, seemed sad in comparison to a week earlier. 

He played with the watch on his wrist and turned his head to the side. Had they replaced them? Quickly, he was proven incorrect. With the slight crane of his neck, some light hit the keychains and they sprang to life, as shimmering and splendid as the first day he had seen them. With the tiniest of smiles, a smile only a few people would be able to detect, he grabbed the one with the cat.

As he held it in his palm, he traced a slightly wet hand across its face. The pad of his finger brushed over the carved nose. Ted knew this wasn’t of the highest quality, but considering it was coming from a gas station a few miles outside of a town known for its odd quality, it wasn’t too bad. 

Maybe it would make her smile. Hopefully.

Ted firmly grasped the keychain in his fist and tore himself away from the counter. Just as he was about to go pay, his feet stopped moving and he felt his heart jump into his throat.

Through the window that was being painted with raindrops, he saw her brightly colored figure slumped against the gas pump. She wasn’t moving. 

With all concern for cat keychains, money, and gas station cigarettes out of his mind, Ted bolted for the door. His shoes made loud whines against the tiles. Similar noises were threatening to spill out of his mouth as he slammed himself into the door and almost fell nose-first onto the slick pavement.

A wailing alarm filled Ted’s senses, but he didn’t care. He scrambled to his feet and rushed forward. His jaw clenched so painfully that he winced, or maybe that was the rain hitting his eyes, the shrieking behind him from the door alarm, or something else entirely. Someone was definitely behind him, but he didn’t stop to listen to whatever they were shouting.

All he could see was Charlotte, her back painfully arched against a gas pump, skirt slightly askew from the bulk of the machine. Her dark auburn hair was soaked all the way through, so much so that it almost looked black, and it hung over and across her face like the legs of a spider.

“Charlotte!?” Ted shouted, growing closer. His thin jacket was doing nothing against the pounding rain, but at that moment, he barely noticed. Charlotte stirred, and he felt relief pour down his throat.

As they finally met, Ted immediately cupping her cheek in his hand, Charlotte’s eyes fluttered open and she stared right at him. They were so dull, so monotone in this light. He couldn’t tell if the streaks on her flushed skin were tears or rain.

“Oh, Ted, I’m sorry…” she muttered, voice as fragile as it always was.

“For… for what?”

Charlotte huffed, blasting warm breath onto Ted’s neck. Her body was slack and completely tension-less against him. He didn’t know whether or not to smile. This was the first time she’d ever let him hold her.

Ted’s shirt, a thin, brown button-up, and Charlotte’s sweater, a cheerful pink item, rubbed against each other. From a distance, through the haze of the fog and the storm, it might have looked as if they were one. 

“Being… silly,” Charlotte finally said. The words came softly from her quivering lips. So softly that Ted might not have heard them if his focus was on anything but her.

It was always like that, wasn’t it?

“Are you okay?” he asked quickly. A persistent itching at the roof of his mouth was bothering him already. He laid a hand gingerly on her back, the hand that still clutched a very cold cat keychain. She leaned away from his gesture, instead opting to press her forehead into his chest. The feeling brought excited jitters to his stomach, but it was also a movement of such defeat that dread began to become evident on his face.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Charlotte looked back up at him. Water hung from each individual eyelash. Snot slowly gathered at the bottom of her chin. “That’s a stupid question, Ted.”

He couldn’t help but chuckle, just a little. He regretted it immediately, but decided not to comment on it. The fact that Charlotte was so pale and her eyes were so gaunt grounded him to the seriousness of the situation.

“Alright, I’m sorry,” he croaked. He didn’t sound nearly as confident as he wanted to. 

They were silent for a while, listening to the rhythm of the rain on the concrete. Cars on the highway sped past and someone was watching them from the doorway of the building, but the pair didn’t move. Charlotte kept her body slumped into Ted’s.

Ted could barely see through the moisture on his eyelashes, but Charlotte kept a fist stubbornly twisted in his shirt, and he was sure he wouldn’t forget that she was there. They were both there.

“I’m going to say something bad, Ted,” Charlotte whispered. She wouldn’t look at him. He couldn’t see where she was looking through her wet hair. “And I don’t want you to make fun of me.”

He choked a little at those words, and she tensed in his arms. “Hey, I’m not like other people, okay? I’ll listen,” he added quietly. Maybe it was hopeful thinking making him believe so, but Charlotte seemed to loosen her muscles a little.

It was then, in this particular silence, that both of them noticed that the alarm was off.

“I… I don’t know,” she muttered, jaw chattering. It was getting cold despite their breaths clouding up around them. “...I don’t know what I’m doing. Anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

Ted didn’t say anything. He took a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes.

“Every day, I...I think it gets worse.” She finally looked at him. “He…”

Charlotte’s chin wobbled. Tears sprang to life in her eyes. “H-he gets…”

The way she said “he”, so carefully, so quietly, like if someone else heard she’d get in trouble - it was always a surefire sign that she was talking about the man neither of them talked about. Her body shook against him violently with sobs.

“I’m sorry, Teddy…”

His hand was stiff and cold. The metal in it seared, not hotly, but coldly, like a sharp icicle digging into his skin. The edges of the cat, a feeling once so sacred, were poking at him and the urge to throw the keychain away, to watch it bounce into the street, land in a puddle, and get run over by the raging wheels of a truck, was growing by the minute. It was scaring him, the stolen item in his hand.

He squeezed against it, silently telling it to stop. Telling the edges to stop itching at his palm, telling the cat to stop mocking him, telling the metal to stop calling him weak. Maybe if he squeezed hard enough, it would stop breathing. It wouldn’t waste its precious oxygen on sneering at him any longer than it already had just by being here in this moment with them.

“Hey, Charlotte,” he suddenly said. He was taken aback by his own words. His chest fluttered up and down like a butterfly’s wings. “Hey…” 

He felt possessed. These words weren’t his own. They couldn’t be. The Ted he knew would not be this brave. 

This new, brave, confident Ted cupped Charlotte’s cheek and lifted her head, softly and slowly, to look at him in the eyes. Hers flickered all over his face, up, down, left, right. The pupils dilated with uncertainty. Rain danced gleefully across her skin.

“Charlotte…” He didn’t know what to say. The raindrops on the cars around them were so loud. He felt like he was going to drown. His heart had that familiar horrible pounding sensation surrounding it. “I’m… I’m going to say something bad.”

She blinked furiously, raindrops and tears flying out of her eyes. Ted rubbed a few away from her cheek absentmindedly, and, for once, she didn’t move away from him.

“I love you.”

The words felt wrong. They hung in the air and they felt wrong, they felt rotten, they felt unnatural. These words were forbidden. They were ignored. They were not allowed. If someone said them, then the other would have to say them, too, and they’d be stuck. They’d be stuck in a relationship, just like-

Charlotte wobbled dangerously close to the pump. Ted was broken out of his thoughts as he attempted to bring her back to her feet. He knew that what he just did was absolutely the worst thing he had ever done in his life, but he would regret it even more if the receiver of that thing slipped and fell.

Their hands were on each other, still. It had been so long, an eternity, and her hands were not gone from his chest. This must have been the longest they’d ever touched outside of the bedroom. She stayed buried in his arms like a puppy.

It was for the better that she didn’t reply. It was for the better that she just forget, move on, say something off-topic like she always did when things got awkward like this. It was always his fault. He was always the one who made her have to shift the conversation, simply because he had gotten too emotional.

Ted was pathetic.

This fact burrowed deeply into his chest. Much like Charlotte, he wasn’t sure if the wetness on his cheeks were rain or tears. He was pathetic. The word, pathetic, played over and over in his mind. Each had a different tone, a different speaker, but all reached the same conclusion. It was such a nasty word. Just the sound of it, the way the tongue scraped against the teeth when you said it. It sounded disgusting. A disgusting word for a disgusting man.

Charlotte said something. She said something that he didn’t hear because he was too busy beating himself up like a lunatic. He could tell that she had said something, however, because her lips moved against his shirt when she did.

He was too scared to say anything. He was afraid of the sound of his own voice. What if he said something stupid again? He couldn’t take the risk.

“Did you hear me?”

Her voice was thick and heavy. 

“No,” Ted replied.

Charlotte was red. Her face was very red, all over, as she looked up at Ted. She almost matched her lipstick. “I said that I love you too, Teddy.”

The keychain made its presence known once more as a sickly warm feeling spread through his entire body at those words. The way her lips curved when she said them, her eyes scanning his reactions as if she cared enough, her gentle tone… He was so warm that he must have been turning all of the rain on him to steam.

He didn’t want to cry. He didn’t. 

But he cried. He cried as Charlotte asked him what was wrong. He cried as she led him back into the store to pay for the merchandise he had essentially stolen. He cried as he gave her the keychain, and saw her smile, and he cried as he got back into the car and drove them away.

He was almost done crying until Charlotte put a shaking hand on top of his. Then he cried all over again.


End file.
